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Comment by option_greek | Hacker News Reader

Half the way into the article, I felt like crying. Is it just me or is the standards committee actively trying to reduce the number of existing C++ programmers. I think we are better off with boost than learning this new stuff. I hope the people in standards committee will lose their C#/Java/<insert cool language> envy and be more selective in what they want to add to standards.

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> I think we are better off with boost

Whoa, let's not say things we can't take back ;)

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/81104943490146304

> I think we are better off with boost than learning this new stuff.

This new stuff actually comes from boost (like most new stuff in C++)

> I think we are better off with boost than learning this new stuff.

Is this not a relatively direct import from boost:

    http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_64_0/doc/html/variant.html

I remember that being relatively painful to use 10 years ago.

Which is why no one uses it. The good thing about boost is you get to evaluate features based on merit and be choosy. Putting these in the standard creates an expectation that developers be aware of how to use them.

I used it together with type() to read the variant's current type and act on that.

The std::variant has a bit nicer API compared to boost with e.g holds_alternative. I expect I would create a make_visitor wrapper myself or use an open source one if needed, but it wasn't needed.

Just use C, and retain your sanity. C++ is full of awkward heavyweight hard to understand abstractions like this.

Straight C is ridiculously hard to write at any scale with any sanity. Not to mention it requires re-inventing stuff that you're basically guaranteed to get wrong (such ref counting), which of course none of the libraries you want to use will support so you have to wrap that up in something else.

C++ is a massive improvement over straight C in pretty much every practical way. And best part is if you don't want to use awkward, heavyweight abstractions like std::variant then you can just not use them and be no worse off for it.

I used to think this until I worked on a large C project at scale.

C++ definitely has some improvements over C, but it definitely does not have a "massive improvement over straight C in pretty much every practical way". It's pretty bad that you have to avoid many parts of the language.

I've also noticed from various projects that C projects tend to have less code to grok than C++ projects while achieving the same thing. Who would've thought.

At this point (and I suspect for a long time), the only thing C++ hasn't that Java and C# have is garbage collection.

And what about all the things that C++ has that no other language in the world has?

I wonder why no other language has added them? Could there be a reason ...

Because different languages have different goals, and most languages don't need the flexibility and power of many of C++'s features, and favor an easier language while sacrificing some of these extra language tools.

At ease soldier. That was exactly my point: C++ has much more stuff than Java and C#. So saying that C++ has Java envy seems weird.

> At ease soldier.

Thank you for the condescension. But if that was your point, you could have written it more clearly.

Or you could just skip the part after the author went "ugh, I have to write a visitor, that's like, so many characters to type." He's whining over a fairly minor point and jumping through way more hoops than necessary. The proposed "default" way to visit std::variant is honestly pretty clear and simple in comparison to most C++ code.

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